Sunday Morning (poem)

"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, ''Harmonium''. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of ''Poetry'', then in full in 1923 in ''Harmonium'', it is now in the public domain. The first published version can be read at the ''Poetry'' web site: The literary critic Yvor Winters considered "Sunday Morning" "the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and... certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English" (Johnson, 100).

Summary

About this poem Stevens wrote that it was "simply an expression of paganism". Helen Vendler in the ''Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens'' summarized the poem as Stevens's search for "a systematic truth that could replace the Christianity of his churchgoing childhood." For Vendler, the stratagem which Stevens employs in attempting to accomplish this purpose is "of writing of himself in the third person, not as 'he' but as 'she', adopting a female persona for reflections that might at the time have seemed too 'unmanly' to be voiced with a masculine pronoun: 'Divinity must live within herself', declares the woman who has decided to celebrate Sunday at home with 'Coffee and oranges' instead of going to church." The critic Robert Buttel sees the poem as establishing the French painter Matisse as "a kindred spirit" to Stevens, in that both artists "transform a pagan joy of life into highly civilized terms."

Notes

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sunday_morning. All quotations from the poem can be found in this source.

References

* Bates, Milton. ''Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self''. 1985: University of California Press
* Buttel, Robert. ''Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium''. 1967: Princeton University Press.
* Stevens, Holly. ''Letters of Wallace Stevens''. 1966: University of California Press.

{{Wallace Stevens

1915 poems
1923 poems
American poems
Poetry by Wallace Stevens
Modernist poems